Greenhouse Policy Architectures and Institutions
Richard Schmalensee1
CONTENTS
The Climate Issue Today................................................................... 2
Developing Institutions and Architectures ......................................... 5
Monitoring and Enforcement............................................................ 8
Alternative Architectures................................................................. 10
Some Additional Issues................................................................... 12
Concluding Remarks....................................................................... 14
References ...................................................................................... 15
The IPCC Working Group III Report (IPCC, 1996; hereafter “the Report”) is a remarkable
piece of work. It is little short of amazing that such a large group of authors and reviewers,
operating under such stringent procedural and substantive constraints, could produce such a highquality document. A policy-maker seeking guidance on the most useful things to do over the next
few years could learn much from this Report about economic dimensions of climate change and
about the design of efficient environmental policies in general. In aggregate, the Report does a very
good job of providing a comprehensible overview of a lot of relevant intellectual territory, some of
it no doubt politically treacherous. The exposition is usually clear and sometimes even elegant,
and, while the Report is not fully internally consistent, the level of consistency attained is
remarkable in light of the production process involved.
This said, however, I believe that a policy-maker seeking guidance for near-term actions would
likely come away from the Report disappointed—or, in the worse case, misled—on some
important issues. The main problem is omissions, not errors. The Report presents a great deal of
information that would be useful to a climate czar making a once-and-for-all global policy choice,
but there is no such czar, and the key near-term choices involve institutional designs and policy
architectures, not particular policies. Moreover, the Report pays insufficient attention to the longterm consequences of possible near-term choices and fails to develop analytical points of which
policy-makers should be aware.
The Report’s discussion of policy issues necessarily reflects its authors’ main assignment:
assessment of the available literature.2 The questions on which the Report concentrates—choice of
policy instruments and of their optimal levels—are central to the literature on environmental
economics and to the domestic policy debates that it mainly seeks to inform. As I argue in what
1
2
Gordon Y Billard Professor of Economics and Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. An earlier
version of this paper was presented at the NBER Conference, “Economics and Policy Issues in Global Warming:
An Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel Report,” July 23–24, 1996, in Snowmass, Colorado, and a very
early version of portions of this essay was presented at an IPIECA workshop in Lisbon in November, 1993. I am
indebted for financial support and intellectual stimulation to the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of
Global Change and to Jae Edmonds, Henry Jacoby, Bill Nordhaus, Eugene Skolnikoff, David Victor, and
participants in the Snowmass and Lisbon meetings for thoughtful and useful suggestions.
It also reflects the Report’s linkages with ongoing international negotiations, which seem fixated on mandating
near-term emissions limits on a relatively small number of industrial nations (the so-called Annex I countries).
As will become clear in what follows, I view this fixation as an unwise architectural decision.
follows, however, the arena in which climate change policy is shaped differs fundamentally from
those in which domestic environmental policies are determined, particularly at this early stage in the
international process. Moreover, the climate issue differs in important and perhaps fundamental
ways from issues that have been addressed (with mixed success) by other environmental treaties.
The authors of the Working Group III Report, and particularly the authors of Chapter 11 on
“Policy Instruments,” have naturally written more about what we know than about what we need
to learn, but, unfortunately, the latter is presently more important. By describing important gaps in
our knowledge clearly, the Report could have made a significant contribution to the intelligent
determination of research priorities.
The assertion that the Report pays inadequate attention to issues related to the near-term policy
agenda plainly rests on a particular view of that agenda. The next section outlines that view.
The Climate Issue Today
There appears to be near-universal agreement regarding several key features of the climate
change issue, most of which are developed by the Report.3 First, the relevant economic and
physical processes operate globally and over decades rather than years. Most plausible emissions
scenarios involve a significant human-induced increase in radiative forcing over the next century,
with much of the increase coming from emissions of countries that are not now wealthy.4 Today’s
emissions will affect the chemistry of the global atmosphere for a century or more and, perhaps,
affect climate for longer. Today’s investments in research and in energy-sector capital will shape
economic activities and affect emissions for at least several decades. Because these lags are very
long, a range of current actions can be profitably thought of as having climate-related consequences
that are to a first approximation irreversible. Few observers foresee substantial climate change for
at least several decades, after emissions and atmospheric concentrations have increased
substantially.
Second, important and probably long-lived uncertainties are ubiquitous. There are important
unanswered questions involving the atmospheric chemistry of trace gases and aerosols,
fundamental climatic processes, future emissions, future technologies, the costs of abating
emissions, and the costs of adapting to climate changes. Despite the language of the Framework
Convention on Climate Change, which calls for “stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in
the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate
system,” there are no known thresholds in that system, but I do not believe the existence of
thresholds can safely be ruled out. Though emissions of many gases and aerosols apparently affect
radiative forcing, significant uncertainties attach to the sources and effects of some of these
emissions.
Third, the climate issue involves potentially huge stakes. On the one hand, the very survival of
the human race depends on the earth’s climate, so that experimenting with that climate seems mad.
On the other hand, stabilizing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases within a century or
so, even at levels well above today’s, is likely to be very expensive. It will almost certainly require
3
4
Schelling (1992) reaches broadly similar conclusions.
See, for instance, Alcamo, et al. (1995) and Schmalensee, Stoker, and Judson (1995).
2
reducing global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) well below current levels.5 At the very least,
since most anthropogenic CO2 emissions are produced by combustion of fossil fuels, reducing
global emissions would likely prevent today’s poor nations from becoming wealthy using
currently-known technologies. Reducing global CO2 emissions substantially relative to trend
would require transforming the energy systems of both developed and developing nations and, as
Chapter 9 of the Report indicates, would likely involve annual costs on the order of several percent
of world income. Such costs would dwarf those of eliminating CFCs from the global economy.
The total direct cost of all current U.S. environmental programs, many of which are extremely
controversial, comes to only about two percent of GDP. Agreeing to incur incremental costs of this
magnitude without clear evidence that any benefits will result also seems a bit mad—particularly
from the viewpoint of poor nations with more immediate environmental problems.
Fourth, analyses of globally optimal climate policies generally do not support imposing
burdensome emission reduction policies over the next decade or so, though very stringent policies
may be optimal thereafter. 6 The basic argument is that to a first approximation damages depend on
long-run cumulative emissions, and in the future we will know more about the consequences of
our actions, we will have developed cheaper abatement methods, we will have had time to invest to
prepare for their use, we will be wealthier, and we will have higher greenhouse gas emissions.
This is of course not an argument for doing nothing today; in particular it is not an argument
against developing technologies useful in abating greenhouse gas emissions or in adapting to
climate change. But it is an argument for doing less to reduce current emissions than would be
optimal if the world had to make a once-and-for-all policy choice.
Fifth, any serious program to control global emissions is almost certain to involve substantial
international transfers, the pattern of which may change over time. As the Report (Section 2.4.2,
p. 71) puts it, “International transfers, in one form or another, are likely to serve as both the
building blocks of globally optimal action and the cement of global cooperation.” This reflects
international differences in marginal costs of abatement, with emissions reductions relative to
baseline typically cheaper in poor than in rich countries (see Section 9.2.5.1 of the Report,
pp. 335-343), as well as in willingness to pay for greenhouse gas abatement. In the latter
connection, it is important to recognize that the identities of rich and poor nations will likely
change, along with patterns of social and political differences, in ways that are difficult to foresee.
Only a few decades ago the U.K. was among the very richest nations, after all, Korea was a
dreadfully poor Japanese colony, and the Soviet Union was a rapidly growing Stalinist
superpower.
Finally, whatever the merits of the case for doing so, there is currently little political support
for devoting substantial resources to this issue, and there is no obvious reason to expect this to
change any time soon. In the U.S., neither the Bush nor the Clinton Administration has yet gone
beyond research and voluntary measures. While some other OECD nations have done more, and
5
See, for instance, Richels and Edmonds (1995) and Chapters 8 and 9 of the Report. I am certainly not arguing that
CO2 should be the only focus of mitigation efforts, since it is not the only cause of the problem. On the other
hand, CO2 from fossil fuels is both the most important anthropogenic emission tending to increase radiative
forcing and the source for which mitigation options are best understood; thus I believe that CO2 is likely to be the
main target of any serious mitigation policies adopted in the next few decades.
6
Most of the relevant “integrated assessment” studies, which include Manne and Richels (1992), Nordhaus (1994),
and Kolstad (1993, 1994), are discussed in Chapter 10; see in particular Section 10.5.3, pp. 368-388.
3
compulsory measures are under active diplomatic discussion as this is written, it is fair to say that
no government has yet imposed burdensome restrictions on its own citizens in the name of climate
change. Moreover, none have shown any serious interest in financing the massive North-South
transfers that are likely to be necessary for a globally affordable transformation of the world’s
energy system.7 Poor nations, of course, generally refuse to allocate any of their own resources to
the climate problem, in part because they generally have trouble finding the resources to solve
environmental and other problems that are literally killing their citizens every day.
Climate change is a difficult issue for the world’s political system. There is no world
government, so individual nations will participate in climate-related activities, including emissions
control, only if they believe that the tangible and intangible benefits to them of doing so exceed the
costs. Because the problem is global, unilateral emissions reductions would generally involve costs
today and at most minuscule benefits ever. Because nations distrust each other and a round of
broken emissions stabilization pledges will not help this,8 governments may be reluctant to spend
resources to honor multilateral agreements. Because uncertainty is so high, of course, there is no
guarantee that even global emissions reductions will yield any benefits. Under these conditions,
refusal to go beyond symbolic actions is not surprising. As Skolnikoff (1990, p. 78) puts it,
“...outside the security sector, policy processes confronting issues with substantial uncertainty do
not normally yield policy that has high economic or social costs.” Moreover, there is no obvious
domestic constituency anywhere pressing for action on climate change, as distinct from other
environmental issues.
All this seems to have clear implications for the near-term policy agenda. As uncertainties are
resolved, and new ones are discovered, the perceived threat of climate change will almost change
in importance over the next few decades. There is no guarantee that this change will be monotonic:
we “learned” from models that the ozone depletion problem was not as serious as had been initially
believed, before detection of the ozone hole refuted those models. A key task of current policy
deliberations thus must be to seek inexpensive, politically salable actions that can be taken today to
reduce the costs of substantial reductions in future emissions, should they become desirable.9
Central to this task must be establishment of effective institutions for policy-making,10 as well
as a policy architecture that permits efficient transitions between particular policies. When time is
7
At the MIT Global Change Forum held in Oslo in May, 1996, during a discussion of the ongoing negotiations on
emission limits for Annex I nations, it was suggested (not by the author) that perhaps negotiations should focus
instead or in addition on the amount of money each rich nation would contribute to an international fund aimed at
solving this problem, since any serious solution would clearly involve substantial North-South transfers. (This is
consistent with Schelling’s (1992, p. 14) suggestion that, “While the developing countries are feeling their way
into some common attack on their own carbon emissions, a tangible expression of their interest and an effective
first step would be to establish a permanent means of funding technical aid and technology transfer for developing
countries, as well as research, development, and demonstration in carbon-saving technologies suitable to those
countries.”) One negotiator rejected this approach out of hand, and no one else even bothered to address it.
8
I believe that there is a good chance that Skolnikoff’s (1990, p. 91) assertion on the eve of Rio that “A premature
commitment to action can pose dangers of error and backlash and can incur costs that would affect a wide variety of
interests” will turn out to have been prophetic.
9
I do not mean to suggest that an exclusive focus on abatement is appropriate, though the international policy
process seems to have adopted such a focus. Logically, it is also important to see what can be done today to reduce
the costs of adapting to future climate change.
10
I hope it becomes clear in what follows that I am not simply calling for the adoption of a voting rule by the
Framework Convention’s Conference of Parties.
4
measured in centuries, the creation of durable institutions and frameworks seems both logically
prior to and more important than choice of a particular policy program that will almost surely be
viewed as too strong or too weak within a decade. Writing before Rio, Skolnikoff (1990, p. 92)
captured the importance of process nicely:
Stringent policies to cut emissions may be politically impossible or even inappropriate
today; but if they prove to be justified in the future, it would be of enormous value to have
a clearer idea of the issues at stake, the policy alternatives, and a process for rapid
response.
In the face of great uncertainty, robustness and flexibility are key to minimizing expected
regrets,11 and their achievement requires attention to institutional design rather than to policy
details. This is not a call to do nothing, just as a call to focus on near-term emissions reductions is
not necessary a call to take effective action; as the Norwegian Prime Minister, Gro Harlem
Bruntland (1996), recently put it, “An ambitious short term emission reduction target without the
introduction of long term practical policies does not necessarily imply a commitment to a long term
global reduction strategy.”
Developing Institutions and Architectures
I do not think the Report analyzes architectural and institutional issues in as serious and
thorough a fashion as they deserve, and it thus pays insufficient attention to the development of
“long term practical policies.” As Prime Minister Bruntland (1996) has said, speaking of the Rio
negotiations, “We knew the basic principles on which we needed to build: cost-effectiveness,
equity, joint implementation, and comprehensiveness. But not how to make them operational.” In
this section and the next I want to consider the Report’s treatment of two important operational
issues: the importance of institutional and architectural design as against policy choice, and the
implications of measurement and enforcement problems.
Much of the Report, particularly Chapter 11, is written as if the world were facing a once and
for all policy choice. In this context, Chapter 11 considers command-and-control regulation,
emission taxes, and tradable permit or quota regimes and comes down in favor of tradable
quotas.12 Presumably policy-makers are to deduce the fairest international allocation of quotas from
the analysis of equity in Chapter 3. There are a number of problems with this picture.
To start with, as Carraro and Siniscalco (1993) and Heal (1994) have emphasized, in the
absence of a world government, substantive actions on climate change will be taken by sets of
11
In a world of uncertainty, all policies will normally generate regrets with positive probability, since there will
normally be one or more states of nature in which another policy would have been better. Policies that have
positive net benefits whether or not the climate problem turns out to be serious have been widely described as “no
regrets” policies. I believe this terminology is misleading for two reasons. First, “no regrets” policies may impose
unacceptable costs on some groups, even though they have positive net benefits in aggregate. These groups may
profoundly regret adoption of “no regrets” policies. Second, if the climate problem turns out to be serious and only
“no regrets” policies have been adopted, many regret that more was not done. It might have elevated the level of
debate if the Report had made these elementary points or at least avoided use of “no regrets.”
12
The Report usefully distinguishes between emissions quotas, allocated to governments and tradable only between
governments, and emissions permits, initially allocated to governments but tradable between any parties to which
governments allocate or sell them. This distinction is not important for my purposes, and I will refer to these
regimes interchangeably.
5
nations if any only if each nation believes it benefits on balance—taking into account international
transfers and any intangible benefits from altruistic behavior. Though Chapter 2 of the Report does
make this point in passing, the Report does not note that there is no reason to think that there is any
relation between Chapter 3’s principles of fairness and quota allocations that will induce
widespread participation in abatement programs.13 Even if widespread participation is not an
objective (as it does not appear to be at present), a political process is necessary to allocate quotas
in any tradable quota system. When the stakes are substantial, it is generally difficult to explain
political outcomes using simple philosophical principles. In the U.S., for instance, the allocation of
tradable permits to emit sulfur dioxide among electric utilities cannot be explained by any simple
principle or rule.14
The Report does not recognize the importance of political decision-making in this context, so it
does not consider how a political process might operate to allocate tradable emission rights or what
sorts of institutions might best facilitate its operation. This omission would not matter, of course, if
the Framework Convention’s Conference of Parties had already established an adequate
institutional structure for this purpose. Since I believe it plainly has not done so, I think this
omission is potentially important.
In fact, serious operational and political problems make it unlikely that the world will soon
adopt anything like a serious (i.e., expensive) global system of tradable emissions quotas or
permits.15 Thus the Report’s concentration on the desirable properties of such systems seems to
leave concerned policy-makers nothing constructive to do in the short run but to struggle against
barriers to their adoption. Similarly, Chapter 11 seems to suggest that the only interesting research
topics relate to implementation problems of these sorts of regimes. In fact, both policy-makers and
researchers confront issues today that have implications both for menus of feasible future policies
and for transitions to such policies. Moreover, the inevitability of multi-dimensional social,
economic, and scientific change on the time-scales involved here makes once-and-for-all adoption
of any particular set of climate-related control policies inconceivable.
At the simplest level, it seems almost inevitable that the optimal stringency of emissions control
policies will change over time in response to changes in scientific knowledge and the development
of new technologies. Thus, even though Chapter 11 appears almost exclusively concerned with
once-and-for-all adoption of either a long-term emissions trajectory or of “hard” or “soft”
abatement policies, such a decision would be both extremely unwise and almost certainly
temporary. Any international climate regime that responds to new evidence and swings of opinion
will change course over time, so an important near-term task is to establish institutions capable of
doing this effectively and efficiently. If, for instance, it is decided (unwisely, I will argue) that the
right policy architecture involves a focus on CO2 emission limits, it follows that one must initially
confront the institutional/constitutional questions of how and how often such limits are to be
revised.
13
On this point, see Edmonds, Wise, and Barns (1995).
See Joskow and Schmalensee (1996).
15
Chapter 11 of the Report outlines some of these operation problems. For further discussion, see Chichilnisky and
Heal (1995), Tietenberg and Victor (1992); see also Victor’s (1991) argument that monitoring problems would
currently limit any tradable permit scheme to CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion.
14
6
Questions of this sort, which are generally ignored by the Report, are far from trivial. While
flexibility is a virtue, it is important to recognize that policy uncertainty inhibits desirable
investment in new technologies and long-lived capital goods, so that stability is also a virtue. In the
context of tradable permits, an unanticipated increase (decrease) in allowable emissions imposes
capital losses (gains) on the holders of existing rights to emit. Similarly, unanticipated changes in
fossil fuel prices alter the value of past investments in energy-producing and energy-using assets.
Thus today’s policy choice creates winners and losers from an array of possible future policy
choices, and the effects of those interests will depend on the institutional/political structure within
which future policies are chosen.
Joint implementation illustrates the likely complexity of future policy changes. When marginal
abatement costs differ, global costs can in principle be reduced by international coordination of
abatement policies. However, the U.S. experience with emissions trading programs demonstrates
that substantial potential cost reductions may go unrealized when transactions costs are high. The
current version of joint implementation, “activities implemented jointly” involves both high
transactions costs and “trading” in undefined property rights. It thus seems very unlikely to
produce noticeable short-term economic gain.16 On the other hand, attempts to reduce transactions
costs and to clarify property rights may yield substantial long-term gains. And attempts to
coordinate abatement policies serve to increase developing country participation in climate-related
activities and to demonstrate the link between international cooperation and cost-effectiveness.
Similar issues are raised by shortcomings of current measurement technology. The Report
(Section 11.7, p. 429) notes that “technology for accurately monitoring many sources and sinks of
greenhouse gases has not yet been developed.” Indeed, David Victor (1991) has persuasively
argued that it may only be possible today to monitor CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion
with the reliability necessary for a tradable permit system. Since, as I discuss further below, it is
hard to imagine any serious mitigation policy in which outcomes cannot be monitored, it seems
likely that the only policy of this sort that could be adopted in the near future would focus almost
exclusively on CO2 emissions from fossil fuels. But today’s measurement problems will some day
be solved, and we may learn that CO2 is less important relative to other greenhouse gases than we
now understand.17 The more comprehensive the coverage of trace gases in an abatement policy, all
else equal, the lower its global costs. It follows that we need to establish policy architectures and
institutions that permit changing the treatment accorded emissions of each of a long list of trace
gasses.
Finally, it must also be possible to change the treatments accorded to different nations. It would
be a great departure from history and from current growth projections if countries’ relative incomes
did not change markedly between now and, say, the middle of the next century.18 Thus to the
extent fairness depends on relative incomes, burden-sharing arrangements that are fair today will
surely not be fair in a few decades. Unfortunately, history, particularly the history of long-term
economic forecasting, also teaches that it is essentially impossible to know how relative incomes
16
On the U.S. experience, see Hahn and Hester (1989); for discussions of the potential of joint implementation and
the steps necessary to realize it, see Torvanger, et al. (1994), Selrod, et al. (1995), and Richards (1996).
17
It is, of course, equally likely that we will learn that CO2 is relatively more important than we currently believe.
18
For discussions of this point and its implications in the climate context, see Edmonds, Barns, and Ton (1993) and
Edmonds, Wise, and Barns (1995).
7
will have changed over such a period. There seems to be widespread agreement now that China
will continue to grow rapidly for some time, while Brazil’s future seems more problematic. Not
long ago, however, Brazil’s prospects looked rosy, while China’s seemed hopeless.
For these and other reasons, an institutional structure is required both to generate and to
readjust political bargains as circumstances, inevitably, change, as well as an architecture that
permits rational adjustment of policy choices over time. There is, perhaps, much to be learned from
such institutions as the GATT (now the WTO), the ILO, and the OECD. The Report’s near-total
silence on these long-term issues seems likely to reinforce the unfortunate tendency of the
diplomatic process to focus on “an ambitious short term emission reduction target” to the exclusion
of “long term practical policies.”
Monitoring and Enforcement
Much of the Report is written as if there were a world government capable of levying taxes,
enforcing emission limits, and defending property rights.19 Thus Chapter 1 (Section 1.3.4.3,
p. 30) simply asserts that “In the absence of compulsory taxation, externalities can only be
addressed with well-defined property rights ... and a legal system that enforces compensation for
externalities” without seriously addressing the consequences of the absence of all of these elements
from the current scene. All supranational discussions of climate change occur within the
conventional framework of international law, within which compliance with treaty obligations is
voluntary or, in some cases, enforced by limited sanctions. And there is no provision in the
Framework Convention as it now stands for any use of sanctions to compel parties to meet their
obligations. While it is conceivable that global institutions dealing with climate change could
somehow come to exercise the sort of supranational authority that has been given to, say, the
European Union, the enormous effort necessary to create the Union in a relatively small, culturally
and economically homogeneous region indicates how very far away we are from anything like
“compulsory taxation.”
The problem of inducing compliance with emission mitigation policies without the ability to
impose sanctions is raised toward the end of Chapter 11 (Section 11.6.5, p. 426), only to be
immediately dismissed:
Indeed, it is a fundamental norm of international law that treaties are to be obeyed, and as a
rule countries do not negotiate, sign, and ratify agreements with the intention that they will
not comply fully with all relevant provisions. Hence, compliance is not as great a problem
as it is sometimes taken to be. More difficult are the problems of negotiating an agreement
that requires real sacrifices by the parties and of getting countries to sign the agreement in
the first place.
Two examples are discussed just below this asserted proposition, presumably in order to support
it. Instead, they seem to cast serious doubt on its validity.
It is first argued that widespread noncompliance with the reporting requirements of the
Montreal Protocol have arisen not from bad intentions, “but rather because [countries] did not have
19
Indeed, one sometimes gets the impression that some sort of global climate czar is implicitly assumed. Thus, in
discussing the effects of future carbon taxes, the Report notes (Section 1.5.5.5, p. 39), “If that were the only
matter of concern, one could simply announce a commitment to impose such a tax sometime in the future...”
Who could the “one” in this sentence possibly be?
8
the resources and technical know-how needed to carry out their obligations.” As even noneconomists know, “I don’t have the money,” almost always means, “I have better things to do
with the money.” If half the signatories to the Montreal Protocol are willing to claim in public that
they couldn’t afford to meet the Protocol’s reporting requirements, it does not take much
imagination or cynicism to predict near-universal non-compliance with a climate protocol involving
costs that are orders of magnitude larger. A history of partial compliance with low-cost
environmental treaty obligations argues that compliance with any burdensome future climate-related
agreements is likely to be very spotty indeed.
Second, it is noted that noncompliance with certain oil pollution treaties was solved when an
equipment standard was adopted that made monitoring easy, and it is asserted in passing that
“monitoring of international agreements may be the more important problem.” This assertion is
hard to dispute; one can only wish its implications had been explored. Most international
environmental agreements rely on self-reporting, and almost none are well-monitored.20 And, as I
noted above, it is at least arguable that for technical reasons only CO2 emissions from fossil fuels
can be reliably monitored today.
Of course, as long as there is little political support anywhere for spending significant
resources to control greenhouse gas emissions, problems of monitoring and compliance are not a
binding constraint on the policy process. If there is no effective pressure to act, barriers to action
have no consequences. But if perceptions and the political climate change, failure to have dealt with
monitoring and enforcement problems may suffice to block significant collective action to mitigate
climate change. After all, the compliance problem is not merely that agreements will fall short of
their stated goals, but that nations fearing noncompliance by others will not sign agreements in the
first place.21
Part of the solution to these problems clearly lies in research on methods of measuring
greenhouse sources and sinks. If the world is to have the option of adopting a significant,
comprehensive program of emission mitigation in the future, it must at least be possible for nations
to monitor each others’ emissions. But an important part of the solution also lies in architectural
and institutional design. Any serious abatement policy requires investment in collection of credible,
internationally comparable data on sources and sinks. This, in turn, requires an institution with
technical expertise, financial resources, and some degree of independence.
More importantly, I believe that even though the Report’s acceptance, particularly in
Chapter 11, of the importance of at least nominally fixing the level of greenhouse gas emissions in
the short run reflects the current tenor of international negotiations, it is nonetheless unwise.22
Countries can almost always plausibly blame unexpected fluctuations in domestic output or world
markets—or the previous government—for failure to meet fixed emissions targets. And, if only
20
See, for instance, Ausubel and Victor (1992) and U.S. General Accounting Office (1992).
The is but one reason why, in a world of poorly-monitored treaty compliance, it is a bit hard to take seriously the
assertion quoted above that compliance is less of a problem than inducing nations to sign.
22
The Report asserts (Section 11.7.3, p. 431) that “the main advantage” of a tradable quota scheme over a carbon tax
approach is that under the former “the resulting global emissions will be known with certainty for a global
agreement and, net of carbon leakage for a nonglobal agreement.” It is at least very optimistic to assume perfect
compliance in the absence of sanctions, as this statement does, and it is absolutely unclear why, when incomes,
technologies, abatement costs, climate processes, and impacts are uncertain, there would be some special value in
making emissions certain even if one could do so.
21
9
because there is a stochastic element in economic activity, and governments do change, it is
difficult to imagine an international regime imposing sanctions tough enough to serve as deterrents
on the basis of past violations of emission limits, particularly in the face of (nearly inevitable)
promises to do better in the future.
Alternative Architectures
Because the Report does not seriously consider alternative institutional paths to strict global
emission control regimes, it suggests that architectural issues of policy sequencing and dynamics
are unimportant. This, in turn, tends to support simply doing the easiest tasks first. I believe that
international negotiations are currently taking us down a path of this sort, with inadequate thought
being given to where it is likely to lead.
The current focus of international negotiations is on achieving reductions in CO2 emissions
from fossil fuel use by industrialized (Annex 1) nations over the next few decades. In the summer
of 1996, the U.S. joined other nations in calling for “legally binding” emissions limits.23 It is not
clear exactly what “legally binding” can mean in the absence of international enforcement, but the
only way to guarantee that any nation’s emissions do not exceed any particular limit is to use a
system of tradable permits domestically. Presumably little will be accomplished until most Annex 1
nations are willing to impose such systems on their domestic energy markets; what will happen
thereafter will depend on how seriously nations choose to take the limits to which they have
subscribed.
The policy architecture implicit in this approach may be characterized as “deep, then broad,”
since any serious program of emission control must involve participation by developing as well as
developed nations.24 Unfortunately, it is not likely to be easy to broaden a geographically narrow
tradable permits regime. In the first place, tradable permits regimes tend to be resistant to policy
changes of any sort, since changes impose capital gains and losses on those with long or short
positions in permits. In addition, as many studies have shown, any geographically limited regime
would induce investment in CO2-intensive activities in non-participating nations, and the owners of
those investments would be new opponents of their nations’ participation. The need to obtain their
assent would increase the international transfers required to broaden participation. Unfortunately,
little if any attention is now being paid to the institutions necessary to effect such transfers or, more
generally, to produce efficient international allocation of abatement effort. As noted above,
achieving such an allocation would require moving well beyond the current pilot phase of joint
implementation.
Schelling’s (1992, p. 13) reaction to commitments he anticipated that rich nations would make
to specific percentage reductions in emissions points to an alternative architecture that I believe is
superior on both environmental and economic grounds:25
23
Statement of Hon. Timothy E. Wirth, U.S. Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs, to the Second Conference
of the Parties to the Framework Convention on Climate Change, Geneva, July 17, 1996.
24
It will also ultimately be necessary to broaden emissions coverage beyond CO2 emissions from fossil fuel use, but
I believe the problem of broadening in this direction does not differ in severity between the alternative architectures
considered here.
25
To be clear, I do not believe that all nations that have adopted percentage reduction commitments have necessarily
done so insincerely. A can be an indication of B without their being perfectly correlated.
10
I cannot help believing that adoption of such a commitment is an indication of insincerity. A
serious proposal would specify policies, like taxes, regulations, and subsidies and would
specify programs (like research and development), accompanied by very uncertain
estimates of their likely effects on emissions. In an international public forum, governments
could be held somewhat accountable for the policies they had or had not put into effect, but
probably not for the emission levels achieved.
As I interpret Schelling’s comments, they point to a “broad, then deep” architecture. This
alternative would place less stress on near-term emissions reductions, which are of relatively little
importance over the long haul, and would concentrate instead on developing institutions to ensure
broad international participation in emissions abatement, which is essential to any serious effort.
“Deepening” would involve later tightening constraints on global emissions and, perhaps,
developing the institutions necessary to give teeth to “legally binding” emissions constraints, when
and if participating nations make a collective decision to do this.
In order to enhance participation in a “broad, then deep” approach, I believe attention should
not initially focus on actual emissions, which are affected by many factors beyond governments’
control. Instead, I would follow Schelling and adopt a hybrid between tax and tradable permit
regimes. This hybrid would involve international review of government actions, as do proposals
for harmonized greenhouse gas taxes, but, unlike those proposals, it would not prescribe the form
of domestic emissions control policies. It would make participation more attractive by not forcing
nations to choose between adopting tradable permit systems and risking involuntary violations of
their treaty commitments. It would involve internationally negotiated emission targets, as do
tradable quota or permit schemes. Negotiation would concentrate on maximizing participation at
acceptable cost, not on implications of abstract notions of fairness, and targets would accordingly
not be burdensome on average in the short run. In order to provide policy flexibility, nations
would demonstrate compliance by showing ex ante that their targets would likely be met rather than
by demonstrating ex post that they were actually met.
The general approach of concentrating on ex ante evaluation of policies rather than ex post
assessment of outcomes is not common in environmental treaties, but it has been employed to good
effect by the OECD and the IMF, among other international organizations.26 It also bears some
resemblance to the administration of clean air policy in the U.S., which involves federal review of
state implementation plans that link planned actions with achievement of air quality standards. It is
in any case much easier to hold governments accountable for current policies than for past
emissions, since the latter depend on policies in effect and random shocks occurring in the past.27
Key to this hybrid approach, of course, is the ability to relate a nation’s current policies to its
likely future net trace gas emissions. This requires developing both data sources and modeling
capabilities, as both the OECD and the IMF have done. If international public opinion is to be the
main enforcement agent for the foreseeable future, and I believe this is likely to be the case, public
opinion should be well and credibly informed by, at least, able and objective audits of national
emissions forecasts. Developing an international institution capable of predicting individual
26
For an insightful discussion of this approach and of the importance of developing data and expertise (along with a
critique of the current “targets and timetables” approach), see Victor and Salt (1995).
27
Largely for this reason I would favor an international carbon tax over a tradable permit or quota scheme, had I not
been convinced by Chapter 11 that the carbon tax involves more serious implementation problems.
11
nations’ greenhouse gas emissions with accuracy comparable to, say OECD predictions of national
inflation rates is a difficult task, but, I would argue, an important one.
Both the “deep, then broad” and “broad, then deep” architectures imply feasible short-run
agendas. The latter would build information, institutions, and international participation that have
considerable insurance value, while the former would have difficulty moving beyond limited
abatement efforts in a few nations. The hybrid approach described above would prepare the ground
for more stringent policies, should they turn out to be justified. An important challenge would be to
make this approach consistent with effective international cooperation involving both equitable
burden-sharing and equalized marginal abatement costs. At the very least, it is hard to see the case
for adoption of a “deep, then broad” architecture based on tradable permits without any serious
analysis of “broad, then deep” architectures or other alternatives.
Some Additional Issues
The Report’s discussion of several issues not mentioned above could have been more useful to
policy-makers. First, and in some ways most important, is the Report’s failure to point out the
inconsistency between the cost-benefit approach and the objective specified in Article 2 of the
Framework Convention:
... to achieve stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that
would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. Such a level
should be achieved within a time frame sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to
climate change, to ensure that food production is not threatened and to enable economic
development to proceed in a sustainable manner.
The first and more quoted of these sentences presumes the existence of a threshold level of
greenhouse gas concentrations, above which lies danger and below which lies safety. It seems to
me that the charge to explore the use of benefit-cost analysis to inform climate change decisionmaking carries with it the requirement to consider the consistency of such analysis with the climate
change objective that has been adopted by the international community. Since I have seen nothing
suggesting the existence of a meaningful concentration threshold, I suspect this Emperor has no
clothes. One could argue that the Report says as much, implicitly, by discussing the assessment of
costs and benefits elsewhere instead of the existence or measurement of thresholds, but straight
talk would have done much more to elevate the level of debate.28
The second sentence quoted above seems to involve thresholds relating to rates of change of
atmospheric concentrations. It appears to be presumed that ecosystems and food production can
adapt without harm to rates of change below some level, while economic development will not be
adversely affected if emissions and thus rates of change are (at least temporarily) above some level.
The presumption that these goals are not inconsistent requires that the second of these thresholds is
above the first. Again, nothing I have seen in the Report or elsewhere that justifies any of these
28
Similar problems have arisen in other contexts, of course. U.S. Clean Air legislation rests on the assumption that
there are threshold atmospheric concentrations of “criteria pollutants,” below which human health is protected
“with an adequate margin of safety.” Limitations of measurement typically make it possible to find concentrations
below which no health effects have been detected and, generally with a straight face, to identify those as the
sought-after thresholds, but there is little support for the idea that such thresholds actually exist. See, e.g.,
Portney (1990, pp. 31-36)
12
presumptions. If the Convention’s objectives require policy debates to be somehow driven by
unknown and probably imaginary thresholds, policy-makers should surely be told this. The high
cost of a serious mitigation program could be substantially increased if it must be erected on an
unsound conceptual foundation. On the other hand, if the Convention’s stated objectives were not
intended to be taken seriously, IPCC Working Group I’s much-publicized analysis of stabilization
at alternative concentration levels was largely wasted effort.
Second, the Report almost completely ignores the non-trivial scientific/economic problem of
how to compare emissions of different greenhouse gases for the purpose of designing policy.29 In
the cost-benefit framework, comparisons of emissions of different gases at the margin must
logically be based on discounted net damages. This basic principle implies that the GWPs
computed by Working Group I and endorsed by the IPCC have no logical foundation or value for
policy-analytic purposes. If this principle is ever stated (or disputed, for that matter) in the Report,
I missed it.30 Certainly, the Report does not attempt to apply this principle. It thus ignores an
economic question that is central to the design of the comprehensive, multi-gas policies mandated
by both the Framework Convention and common sense.
Third, the Report also pays insufficient attention to analytical issues raised by North-South
resource transfers. At several points the Report does note both the likely importance of such
transfers in any substantial mitigation effort and the difficulty of effecting them; e.g., Section
2.4.2, p. 71:
Nevertheless the political and managerial difficulties surrounding such transfers need to be
understood and respected by all parties if the process is not to collapse into an unproductive
struggle over resource transfers.
Unfortunately, “the political and managerial difficulties” are not spelled out, nor are any related
economic issues examined. Chapter 11 considers the potential role of carbon taxes or allocations of
tradable quotas or permits in effecting transfers, but the discussion stops short of providing any
useful guidance—or even indicating whether such guidance can currently be provided.
Finally, the Report properly notes at several points that because of the long time intervals
involved, the development of new technologies has the potential to reduce dramatically the ultimate
costs of both mitigation and adaptation policies. And at several points the Report goes on to argue
for increased government spending for basic and near-basic research as insurance against the need
to adopt stringent climate-related policies in the future. Most integrated assessments similarly
conclude that near-term policies should include acceleration of the development of technologies that
would be useful in connection with such policies.
But advances in basic research do not generate new commercial technologies without
considerable additional investment, and it is not clear how, if at all, governments can usefully
enhance this critical stage of the innovation process. As the Report (Section 1.5.4, p. 37) correctly
notes, “...there is a general consensus among economists that the patent system provides a better
basis for financing applied research than do government grants, largely because of the difficulties
29
For treatments of this problem, see Hammitt, et al. (1996), Kandlikar (1995), Reilly and Richards (1993),
Schmalensee (1993). The last of these papers is cited in passing in Chapters 1 and 11.
30
The closest the Report seems to come to such a statement is to note (Chapter 1, note 8, p. 41) that Schmalensee’s
(1993) criticisms of GWPs would be immaterial “if all greenhouse gases had the same rate of decay.” But, of
course, they don’t.
13
government has in picking those innovations most likely to produce high returns.” U.S. experience
appears consistent with this consensus.31 Thus we have a potentially important and difficult
question that the Report ignores: How can governments most efficiently encourage the
development of new technologies that will reduce future abatement and mitigation costs? A related
set of ignored questions have to do with efficient policies to enhance North-South technology
transfer.
In a recent paper, Grubb, Chapuis, and Duong (1995) argue that a good way, perhaps the only
good way to encourage development of energy-saving technologies is simply to raise the price of
energy. Thus they argue that recognition of induced innovation tends, for instance, to raise optimal
global carbon taxes. An interesting question in this context is whether or not slightly higher energy
prices tend to accelerate development of technologies useful at much higher energy prices. It seems
at least plausible that slightly higher prices would call forth incremental improvements, while the
best response to much higher prices would be to investigate radical departures from current
technologies. If this is true, the insurance value of feasible induced innovation is limited, and the
search for alternative, relatively efficient approaches to encouraging the development and
deployment of efficient, greenhouse-friendly technologies becomes more important.
Concluding Remarks
On the whole, the IPCC Working Group III Report is a very impressive document that clearly
embodies many, many hours of hard and competent work. It presents much useful information on
the economics of climate change, and its discussions of cost-benefit analysis and the principles of
cost-effective environmental policy should be required reading for policy-makers with a wide range
responsibilities. Its generally negative evaluation of traditional command-and-control approaches to
environmental policy should be read closely by those advocating adoption of common standards of
various sorts by Annex I states.
On the other hand, the Report does not cover in adequate depth some issues that are important
to near-term decisions. Considerable attention is devoted to hypothetical once-and-for-all policy
choices that are not on the table, while the longer-term implications of current decisions are largely
ignored. While the Report does note that the stringency of optimal abatement policies are likely to
vary over the next several decades, the implications for institutional and architectural choice are not
explored. The Report understates the importance of monitoring and enforcement problems. It is
written as if a comprehensive global tradable permits regime were a live policy option instead of
possible but distant goal. It ignores the value of building global participation and climate-related
institutions and accepts the myopic focus of current international negotiations on (relatively) shortterm reductions in emissions from industrial nations. To be clear, all these gaps mirror
shortcomings in the existing literature, but that does not make them less important.
31
For an overview in the context of energy supply technologies, see Schmalensee (1980). Few observers would
claim that the U.S. government’s large investment in research on those technologies has yielded competitive
returns.
14
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